Hope For A Lame Duck

Hope For A Lame Duck. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Congress has adjourned until after the election so lawmakers can hit the campaign trail in their states. One piece of business they left undone was the farm bill, even though the current farm bill expires at the end of September. The Senate has passed their version, but the House version is on hold until the lame duck session.

MOORE: A lot of questions are being tossed out now. Why didn’t Congress get the farm bill done before they went home for elections? It’s a wonderful political science exercise. The bottom line is they did not get it done. So you can either sit on the sidelines and whine and complain that something didn’t get done or you can cowboy up and get on down to the lame duck session and be ready to jump in the tent as soon as they open the door.

That’s Dale Moore American Farm Bureau Farm Policy Specialist who says the September 30th expiration does not mean that on October 1 there will be huge changes in farm policy or programs, but it does get the ball rolling, because without a new farm bill, the law reverts to the 1949 version. 

MOORE: They’re going to have to take some kind of action, otherwise the Secretary will have to start implementing the dairy title under the old 1949 Agricultural Adjustment Act. It’s a very tough, structured, mandatory supply-management kind of approach that is just very much out of step with the way today’s modern dairy operations operate.

And what might that mean to consumers?

MOORE: The price of milk could double, it could triple, it could quadruple. It’s kind of hard to predict but there will be an effect in the grocery store.

And Moore says that’s just one reason that lawmakers really need to be ready to act on the farm bill after the election.

MOORE: When it comes to agriculture, when it comes to food on the table, there’s a reason why our nation centers a lot of its homeland security around protecting our food and our agricultural supply. That’s because we need a stable, affordable, abundant supply of food to take care of 300 million-plus people. That’s not necessarily true of all the gadgets and gizmos that are manufactured out there.

Moore explains why he thinks the farm bill wasn’t passed before the congressional recess.

MOORE: I think fundamentally the difference coming out of committee in terms of the nutrition assistance cuts, a number of Republicans who thought that that was not enough and the number of Republicans who thought it was too much. The bottom line is, at least the indications were, that Mr. Boehner and his leadership team didn’t feel they had the 218 votes necessary to get a farm bill done on the floor.

He says that right now the biggest problem farmers are dealing with is uncertainty.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.